Did you hear the one about the film blogger who couldn’t get a wifi connection? Last week, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reported the following: “I arrived in Oxford around 5:30 pm and checked into the Oxford Downtown Inn, courtesy of the Oxford Film Festival. And then the wireless issues began. It's now just before 6 am and the issues haven't stopped, and I've decided to cut bait as a result. That's right -- I'm outta here, flying back to NYC. Or maybe I'll drive south a bit and cruise around, find an adventure, something. Any place with decent wifi I call home…I can't do this. I won't do this. This is not 1997, and if a regional film festival is unable to provide easy, high-speed wifi to its journalist guests then no offense but it just shouldn't invite them down in the first place.”
The reaction from other participants in the Oxford Film Festival was swift and to the point. Eric D. Snider’s Blog puts it succinctly: Jeff Wells should be ashamed of himself. “He was one of the people invited to appear on the panel about film criticism this morning at the Oxford Film Festival, and I was eager to meet him. Though we’ve been attending many of the same festivals for several years, I’d never actually talked to him, and I was curious to learn whether he was as much of a condescending, humorless curmudgeon as he seems in his blog…Our introduction was affable enough, and we chatted briefly at the opening-night party. My impression was that maybe he plays the role of the ever-offended grouch online because it’s interesting and is perfectly reasonable in everyday life. And then he refused to appear on the film criticism panel because he couldn’t get wifi in his hotel room. I’m not making this up. I’m not even exaggerating. The festival invited him here ONLY to be on the panel. I’m sure they hoped he’d write about it on his blog, too, but his official reason for being there was the panel. They paid for his plane ticket. They covered his hotel room. And he refused to do the panel — remember, the ONE THING HE WAS THERE FOR — because of the unreliable Internet access in the hotel. (The free hotel.).. .Let me make this clear. This small film festival, which operates primarily on donations and the tireless work of volunteers, paid several hundred dollars to fly Jeffrey Wells out here and get him a hotel room, all so that he could be a guest on the panel. They hoped his relatively high profile in the movie blogosphere would help create cachet for the still-growing young festival. And then he repaid them by snottily refusing to fulfill his obligation.”
At SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth writes a mild defense of Wells. “In his first of three anti-Wells posts this weekend, Snider pumps the party line that Wells shouldn’t have missed the panel over concern that he wouldn’t be able to file coverage of the festival –– which is probably true –– but then proceeds with the fallacy that Wells’ coverage was less important to the festival than his appearance on the panel…Sure, no reputable festival would tell a journalist that they’d pay for their trip chiefly because the festival wants the coverage, and no reputable journalist or blogger would take that deal. But anybody who pretends like festivals don’t extend panel and jury invitations to journalists in the interest of increasing their profile with the press is delusional…But as of now, by creating a firestorm of bloggy press around a festival that none of the other invited journalists killed themselves to cover, isn’t Jeff Wells the Oxford Film Festival’s de facto best friend?”
He may not be the festival’s best friend, but at least they got an amusing short film out of the whole ordeal:
